Column: Two families, united at Gettysburg

Gettysburg, 1863. Two families, two fates. Both sent sons into the bloody battle with the 140th Pennsylvania Volunteers. One returned, one didn’t. This is their story.

The families of David Acheson and John Burns had long been linked, dating to 17th century Ireland and Scotland. As James I was giving us the King James version of the Bible and colonizing Jamestown in America, he was also sending settlers from Scotland to the nearby north of Ireland. There the Acheson and Burns families ended up as neighbors, peasant farmers working the land near the village of Markethill in County Armagh.

The next century saw sons of both families come to America, where they both ended up in Washington, Pa., neighbors once again. Alexander Burns was whisked away — shanghaied — by the British Navy in 1754 to serve as a powder boy aboard a man-of-war. Alex jumped ship in New York harbor, fought in the Revolution as a Pennsylvania Rifleman, and then settled in southwestern Pennsylvania. John Acheson also departed Markethill under stress, that of business debts and a bad marriage. But his new mercantile business in Washington flourished, and he soon sent for his brother David to come over and join him.

The families were also Calvinist co-religionists, members of the Markethill Seceder Church which had hived off from the mainline Presbyterian Church. Burns family letters of the 1790s from Ireland were addressed to “David Acheson, shopkeeper, Washington, Pensilvenia,” later letters correcting the spelling. But the next century saw the families drift apart, the Burnses becoming farmers outside Washington while the Achesons remained in town, businessmen and bankers. Gettysburg would bring them back together.

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When war came, both sent sons to enlist in the 140th Pennsylvania Volunteers. Both David Acheson, grandson of the shopkeeper, and John Burns, great-grandson of the shanghaied sailor, were college students at the time. But they were more than willing to trade books for battles, both recruiting their friends and neighbors to fill out the regiment’s roster.

John Burns was a sergeant in Company A, David Acheson captain of Company C. David wrote of their baptism of fire at Chancellorsville, bullets zinging by and bombs bursting. “It would be impossible to describe the feelings of a green soldier; a holy horror seizes him at first, but he soon becomes accustomed to the whizzing and bursting of fiery messengers and trusts to fate.”

Suddenly the 140th was at Gettysburg and thrust into the front lines, a farmer’s field where wheat of golden hue ran red with blood. This battle site was forever after known simply as The Wheatfield or the Valley of Death.

But John Burns’ brother used a different name in describing John’s fate: “John celebrated his twentieth birthday in the Vortex of Death, the wheat field where men were mowed down by the thousand. His brigadier general, Zook, was killed; his colonel, Roberts, was killed; his captain, McCullough, seriously wounded.”

Since both of Company A’s lieutenants were also disabled, John “came out of the battle in command of his company.”

Sadly, Captain David Acheson did not survive the withering blaze of rebel guns, South Carolina and Georgia units rapidly advancing across the wheatfield.

“Men of the 140th reeled and fell on every side,” reported a regimental history. “David Acheson, a young officer of rare ability and winsome personality, was killed,” a newspaper account adding that “a shot pierced the noble breast of Captain Acheson.”

In some sense, the carnage was incalculable since numbers alone don’t measure grief, sadness, pain, and the potential of young lives lost forever. David Acheson was an outstanding young man, a leader who might have been a lawyer and judge like his father or a banker, businessman, and legislator like his grandfather, the David Acheson who came over from Markethill. This is the true but unknowable measure of battle loss — what might have been.

John Burns survived the battle and became a minister, his brother describing the effects of warfare: “The war had made a deep impression on John; the awful wickedness he had seen awakened the deepest religious feelings of his soul, and he entered the ministry, hoping to make the world better by teaching the gospel of peace and good will.”

On this 151st anniversary of Gettysburg, may the men of the 140th and other units who sacrificed their lives for liberty and national unity be remembered and honored.